Manoj Karanth

12/09/2016

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What does 2017 foretell for cloud computing?

Last year, we saw companies move quickly to adopt some form of cloud computing tools and services, recognizing that these technologies could reshape the competitive landscape. A global survey conducted in April 2016 by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services found that 85% of the organizations surveyed plan to use cloud tools moderately to extensively over the next three years. The cloud’s ability to increase business speed and agility, shape new business models, foster innovation and expand collaboration are the drivers for this high adoption rate. In the coming year, we expect to see clients invest in four key areas that will enable this momentum to continue.

Data center migration

Data center consolidation and migration to the cloud will continue to gain ground in 2017. A few key factors—such as parity of IaaS features across at least three major cloud service providers, maturity and understanding of cloud security, and commoditization of “lift and shift” migration tools—are contributing to this growth. These tools have also reduced the amount of time required for cloud migration.

Continuous availability and vendor independence

In the past few months, new architectures across SaaS, OLTP and big data have focused on continuous availability by placing cloud computing at the center. The preferred stack is micro services through Spring Boot and Node.js, with container-based deployment mainly through Docker but coupled with container orchestration engines (primarily Kubernetes on Apache Mesos, though OpenShift may be preferred). We expect production deployments of this stack to expand even more in 2017.

New workload types and PaaS

Many organizations that have adopted cloud computing are now exploring more workload types in their cloud ecosystems. The fastest-moving workloads—enterprise collaboration, the Internet of Things (IoT) and big data analytics—will continue to accelerate in the coming year.

In enterprise collaboration, we should see an increased pace of integration with the Office 365 ecosystem and Salesforce multicloud solutions. Employees and partners have high expectations for productivity, they want to take part in strategizing org-wide initiatives, and they want to be included in decision-making.

The pace of device integration with the cloud has increased, as indicated by the rapid rate of PaaS services adoption by our customers.

We have not seen new IaaS workloads for IoT use cases thus far, but we do anticipate more deployments in 2017. These use cases have been extended through big data analytics, mostly in the areas of telemetry, anomaly detection and preventive maintenance.

Cloud monitoring and management

In the new year, we predict a shift in focus from cloud adoption to cloud optimization. Businesses have already shown a clear expectation of better cloud governance and management. While IT leaders have invested in cloud management platforms, their existing contracts and relationships with IT service providers have impeded their adoption of cloud optimization techniques. Going forward, we expect to see a wider selection of managed cloud providers with cloud operations tied to increased automation and integrated monitoring across application and infrastructure.

Mindtree has helped businesses go digital with the cloud as a critical component of that entire journey. What does your digital road map look like for 2017? Contact us to start the conversation.